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Thursday, 28 February 2013

Oldhammer Weekender: Realm of Chaos Warbands Mass Battle Explained

It may appear that not a great deal is happening at the moment regarding the proposed Oldhammer Event at the Wargames Foundry in Nottingham late this summer. This is actually quite wrong. In between juggling demanding jobs, wives and kids and other modern hurdles, a few of us are frantically working behind the scenes to make this exciting event a reality.

Gaj and I had a conversation the other night about how best organise the gaming that is going to take place over the two days. We know that place is limited, and what to ensure that people have a change to play Third Edition (or, indeed, any other retro games they wish to play) as well as having the chance to check out models in other enthusiasts collections, have a beer and a bite to eat, trade lead or whatever.

So, Gaj is going to be setting up shortly a booking system which will allow you to reserve a table for gaming for a particular slot over the two days. Really, this is intended to support the 'Bring and Battle' types that are more than happy to collect their forces, find an opponent and just rock up on the day and get on with it. Additionally, you will have the choice to select to play one of the demonstration/pick up games that we play to have prepared for the day or contribute to the Realm of Chaos 25th Anniversary Clash of the Warbands thingy...

The purpose of this post is to provide a little information about how RoC part of the proceedings will take place.

It goes without saying that this will be the ruleset we will use as the basis to the RoC game.

RoC: Slaves to Darkness 25th Clash of the Warbands

I thought long and hard about how best to organise this. I spoke to Gaj, Erny, Thantsants and others about their ideas and discussed things with Dan, who many of you will know I played against during my own recent Realm of Chaos Warbands campaign.

In a nutshell, its a clash between Khorne and Slaanesh. The premise being, that the Chaos Gods themselves have ordered a ritualistic combat to take place and a desired place and at a desired time. The call has gone out across the Chaos Wastes, deep into the forests of the Old World and beyond. Warbands and champions are on the march, heading ever north, drawn by some powerful compulsion to steer their forces to a barren plain beneath the insidious gazes of two of the most powerful Gods of Chaos.

There a battle must be fought. Fought for the amusement of uncaring Gods.

They seek to settle an argument.

And it will be settled in the blood of thousands.

Here are the details as they currently stand.

The game will be played over a rectangular table set up. This may be many tables pushed together, or more than one table. This largely depends on interest, so we will be able to provide more detail about this in the future.

All table edges will be possible entry points to the game, though one will be selected as Khorne only and other as Slannesh only, leaving the player with three possible entry points to enter the conflict.

A player may enter the conflict at any time, or elect to withdraw his warband at anytime, similar to the way that you can drop in and out of online Xbox 360 games as you wish, though withdraws will need to be moved as part of the game turn. This should provide a great deal of flexibility about where you choose to start with your warband, and would represent the champion selecting the best possible position for his forces upon arrival at the battle. You could even play for a while, move out of the action, and return later if you so wished.

Models can be treated as character models (they move independently) or as units. Units can be mixed on racial grounds, so dwarfs, goblins and skaven all in one unit is fine, with the restriction that movement will be calculated by the slowest moving member of the unit and that base sizes need to be consistent with the unit as a whole.

Reward points will be given to champions for different actions, though these are yet to be fully confirmed, but would look something like this.

There will be another because this is too awesome. I ran a campaign of games using 6th edition's Paths to Glory years back and while it was fun, there just wasn't the randomness of ROC and LATD so it fizzled after a handful of games.